During the 2008 Lights In The Sky tour we began an open camera policy for stills and video during all NIN shows, inviting fans to capture the events with anything from a cell phone to a hi-def video camera. The results have been overwhelming, filling our own galleries with thousands of images and videos from every show, and inspiring a number of ambitious fansourced video projects within the NIN community. Some of those projects are starting to surface now, and we couldn’t be happier with the way the fans have organized themselves and created some truly impressive work.

On the recent Wave Goodbye tour, we were unable to professionally film the band’s performance of The Downward Spiral at Webster Hall, due to exorbitant fees requested by the LiveNation venue. Our open camera policy, however, remained in tact, and as soon as the show ended fans took matters into their own hands, organizing online to track down everyone who had filmed HD footage of the show. Now, only two months later, the group has released a polished, edited, downloadable DVD of the full Downward Spiral performance from Webster Hall. The entire thing has been recorded, edited, and distributed entirely by fans, and it’s the latest example of the amazing things fans will do when their creativity isn’t limited by outdated, misguided restrictions.

You can watch “The Downward Spiral: Live” in HD on this YouTube playlist. You can download it via torrent as a burnable DVD or an iPod/iPhone-friendly video from this page (click the question mark link on that page if you’re new to downloading with torrents).

We filmed all of the other final Wave Goodbye shows professionally, and you can expect to see that footage surface in some form or another in the future. In the meantime, we appreciate the efforts of The NIN Hotline, This One Is On Us, and everyone else who helped to immortalize the Webster Hall performance.